In his tenth-floor corner suite overlooking Sydney's Circular Quay, an animated Mark Textor is likening driving an election campaign to big wall climbing. "You see the climbers up there and it all looks very neat; they are putting up the ropes as they go and you think you see the pattern. But if you're actually the one out in front, you're half-planning the route and half-thinking, 'How the f... am I going to do the next bit?' " he says.

The interruption comes from a tousle-haired boy temporarily occupying the executive desk at the other end of the room.

Advertisement

"Sorry," groans Textor.

"Daddy, don't think you can just get away with it - 'cause you're not going to," seven-year-old Oscar persists.

The Commish: Textor's father, Roger, a former deputy commissioner of police in the Northern Territory. Photo: Roger Textor-PH0416/0038-ABC TV

Textor, even more apologetic: "Don't tell Mummy." Given the bollocking the combative Textor usually dishes out to critics, it's an astonishing sight.

The man known in political circles as "Tex" ("even the prime minister calls me Tex") is either sinister genius or electoral wizard, depending on which side of the political divide you occupy. He's been the numbers man and campaign whisperer behind every significant Coalition win for the past two decades. Victorian Liberal powerbroker Michael Kroger says Textor and long-time business partner Lynton Crosby are "probably the best in the world at what they do, which is defining, managing and then communicating key political messages. Tex has a unique innate intuition like none other I have ever seen." London's Tory mayor Boris Johnson, for whom he's helped run two campaigns, calls him a "sorcerer of numbers".

Political adversaries tend to agree. Former ALP national secretary Tim Gartrell dubs him "the best in the business", while former NSW party boss Sam Dastyari describes Textor as "frighteningly brilliant". More scathingly, Labor Senator John Faulkner once accused him of having a "pervasive and pernicious" influence over the Liberal Party. Yet, until the end of last year, few Australians had heard of the man who's been quietly reading their minds for years. A simple act of hubris last November changed that.

Amid an uproar in Jakarta and Canberra over leaked news that Australia had tapped the mobile phones of the Indonesian president and his wife, Textor let fly with a tweet mocking Indonesia's demand for an apology and seeming to demean the country's respected Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa. "Apology demanded from Australia by a bloke who looks like a 1970s Pilipino [sic] porn star and has ethics to match," he scoffed.

It earned him a slapdown from Tony Abbott, calls for his sacking as Liberal pollster, and front-page treatment in the Indonesian capital. He received death threats ("the Bahasa twittersphere is crazy," he says), eventually issued a retraction of sorts and has since sworn off recreational tweeting for good - albeit leaving behind some gems in the Twitter archive. In one he dubbed commentator Peter Brent a "lightweight c...", though he later withdrew that, too.

Textor dismisses the Indonesian episode as "piss and wind" - "a whole bunch of people playing to their domestic audiences. It hasn't made a difference to my business, to my life, to my friends." In any case, he argues, The Guardian and the ABC were most to blame for giving each other a "blow job" and joining forces to break and promote the phone-tap story. "Next to what they did, what I did is virtually irrelevant," he says. "I regret that I gave the usual suspects, enemies of mine, a free kick. It's the only [regret] I have."

Behind the scenes, though, he wasn't so cool. Businessman Shane Stone, the former Liberal Party president and Northern Territory chief minister who got him started in political polling, recalls Tex ringing him and saying, "I'm in the shit."

"It's like the mad professor or the mad composer," Stone adds. "The guy is brilliant. But every so often he does something and I will say, 'Mate, I can't believe you did that!' "

Federal Trade Minister Andrew Robb, another early mentor, says "he's a complex character. He'll lose it every now and again, but you wouldn't want to knock it out of him because he's a creative person, creative with strategy and tactics."

"Tex is probably too concentrated in 140 characters," jokes former lobbyist Ian Kortlang, referring to Twitter's message length. "It's too strong a dose." The trademark abrasiveness, the forcefulness, is all part of the pollster's brand or "sell", he adds. But it can backfire. Grahame Morris, John Howard's former staffer, says Textor was never a shrinking violet. But as he became more assertive over the years about how his numbers should inform strategy, there was pushback, particularly from some inside the party organisations in Victoria and NSW.

"There were times where his dogmatic approach was counterproductive," says Morris. "Even if the advice was good, ears were half closed to him, because Tex had harangued them for a while, insisting that people had to do x, y or z."

Yet American political strategist Joe Trippi, a seasoned campaigner for the US Democrats, is adamant there's no one he would rather work with in a crisis. He and Textor joined forces a few years ago for several deeply mysterious missions on behalf of anonymous American political do-gooders. One was a trip to Iraq in the run-up to provincial elections, with Textor, Crosby and Trippi basing themselves in Istanbul and flying in and out of northern Iraq (a route chosen, it seems, to help keep them off the official radar).

Trippi says cryptically, "We put an international team together to try to make a difference in a difficult situation politically." Textor, he says, was "very professional, data-driven and calm as a cucumber in situations of stress."

Labor's former special minister of state, Gary Gray, is another close friend from across the political divide. He and Textor first encountered each other in Northern Territory political circles in the late '80s but didn't click until after the close-run federal election of 1998. Textor rang the vanquished Gray (then Labor's national secretary) and said, "Mate, I think you are a pretty amazing operator. I know how tough it is, having been through one of these shitty losses, but I think you should be proud."

They got talking soon afterwards on a plane trip, and catch up regularly. Three years ago, Gray attended Textor's politically star-studded wedding to Susie Munson, a freelance book editor who used to be on Peter Costello's staff.

Textor says the relationship with Gray is part of the code he lives by: "Loyalty to your family, your ex-wife, your mates, former adversaries who have been sacked or lost an election. You say, 'We've been through something together, can I help you?' 'Cause that's the only thing that humanises you in this shitty f...ing world."

Cate McGregor, the transgender army officer who used to be the political consultant Malcolm McGregor, is godfather-turned-godmother to Textor's youngest son. "When I transitioned, Tex lost someone who mattered a lot to him, and he was kind of spun out by it," McGregor says. "But it was touching to watch the way he floundered to try to keep me in his life. He has a really big heart. He loves and hates with incredible ferocity." McGregor says Textor is intensely private under the supremely confident facade. "He is an amazing mimic, a scream. But it's also a defence mechanism to stop you probing into the rest of him.

"He is proud of what he does and he knows he's good, but has really little self-belief. He's a textbook introvert, like me; we compensate by talking at a thousand miles an hour about stuff we are strong on". Later I ask Textor how many really close friends he has. He replies, "Five."

The Crosby/Textor headquarters in Sydney hums with quiet but intense activity. Above the reception desk there's a snappy three-word slogan: "Research. Strategies. Results." The company turns over around $30 million a year with corporate offices in Sydney, London and Milan, and an anonymous fieldwork centre somewhere in eastern Australia.

He and Lynton Crosby met in the early 1990s when Andrew Robb, then the newish federal Liberal Party director, recruited both men to party headquarters in Canberra. Robb had talent-spotted Textor, then in his mid-20s and working as a rookie pollster for the Country Liberal Party in Darwin, at a regional conference in Queensland. "He was articulate, decisive, strategic; he turned data into something understandable for all these lay members," Robb says.

Robb, like Textor, had trained in economics and statistics, and wanted rigour brought to the party's tracking of political sentiment. And he wanted the clubby party headquarters in Canberra shaken up.

Textor, who describes the Liberal Party back then as "sort of upstairs chaps and downstairs chaps", made quite an entrance. He'd driven his blue L-series Subaru wagon down from Darwin in two-and-a-half days, and was still shaking the Top End dust off his boots when he walked into party HQ. "I had my big, old tatty shirt on, a pair of jeans, a six-inch ponytail, a great gold earring and a goatee. I literally looked like a bikie," he says.

Robb recalls that Textor in those days could be hard to manage. "Sometimes he wouldn't turn up, and we couldn't find him and he wouldn't have a phone on and then he would turn up two days later and say nothing - it was a form of going walkabout."

Despite being initially self-schooled as a pollster, Textor had helped cement the CLP's hold on power in the Top End. Stone remembers him as "consumed by the work. He might come in at six in the morning and still be sitting there at midnight to get on top of it."

But arriving in Canberra in early 1992, Textor struggled to see how he could sell then Liberal leader John Hewson or his Fightback! package, a huge, dry document built around a universal goods and services tax. Hewson lost the 1993 election and was toppled as Liberal leader the following year. Textor had a role - he insists inadvertent - in Hewson's downfall. McGregor (then a Liberal consultant) revealed recently that Textor had shown him some internal research damaging to Hewson, which McGregor then leaked to the media.

Textor adamantly denies being a knowing party to the leak, and Robb plays the episode down. Nevertheless, the revelation has been noted with "huge interest" and raised eyebrows in certain party quarters, according to one very senior Liberal. In any event, Textor survived to become critically important to each of John Howard's four federal election victories.

Every morning during campaigns he would be up before dawn, studying the marginal seat polling data his teams had collected the night before. "He was shaping the road map, he would be the one sitting there talking to the prime minister every morning at those ungodly hours," says Shane Stone.

In 1994, Textor spent a few months in the US working for Ronald Reagan's legendary pollster, Richard Wirthlin, and later set up a branch of Wirthlin's in Australia, though still doing work for the Liberals. "Richard taught me to persuade by reason, but motivate through emotion. A lot of pollsters will ask, 'What is your biggest issue?' I want to know why you mentioned that issue, not what the issue is. He taught me: get to the motivator."

Robb saw this in action as he watched Textor's skill with focus groups, drawing to the surface their deepest fears, hopes and emotional drivers. Robb says Textor would "just keep getting down, layer upon layer upon layer, until at the end you not only knew what the problem was but what their key motivations were and the sentiments that drove those motivations, and then he would try out the things that might address them."

A 1990 memo by Textor - later tabled in the Northern Territory Parliament - conveys something of the process: "Political candidates need to know not just the state of public opinion but how to respond to it, how to exploit it and how to manipulate it." Ian Kortlang describes it as "digging down to the deepest layers so you can affect people subliminally".

The cautious Howard and the blunt-speaking Textor were chalk and cheese, and Textor admits his relationship with Howard was "always tense". "We're the least likely people to have a beer together in the world," he says. But he adds, "There was mutual respect there."

In 2002 Textor and Crosby formally set up in business together and he boasts that there is not an inhabited continent where they haven't worked. The pair has advised New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and British Prime Minister David Cameron as well as Tony Abbott. They have operated in Fiji, Zimbabwe (where wealthy US donors quietly funded their work in support of the Movement for Democratic Change), the Middle East, North Africa and south-east Asia. But Textor says politics is only 10 per cent of the company's work and the rest is for business clients.

On a wall of his office hangs a framed T-shirt with the slogan "Remind Me. Who Voted for Ken Henry?" - a legacy of the mining industry's campaign against a minerals resource rent tax recommended to Labor by the former head of Treasury, Ken Henry.

Textor looks built for speed. The face and head are smooth as polished wood, the penetrating eyes and goatee give him the look of Johnson's sorcerer. He shed 20 kilograms in the last year. He now counts calories - 2072 a day, to be precise - and after we've had lunch one day, he texts to check whether he'd had one beer or two.

His great hobby is cycling, and he keeps more than 20 of the machines in his garage. His latest toy is a mini-bike. Asked what he does on it, he jokes, "What internationally famous pollsters do - they practise on their clown bikes." Friend Tim Unsworth, who joined him on a cycling trip in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in 1998, says Textor is the only non-professional cyclist he's met who can pull off a hands-free track stand. Textor also chairs the Amy Gillett Foundation, a non-government organisation that campaigns for greater safety on the roads for cyclists. In 1990, he nearly lost his life when a semi-trailer turned on a red arrow and sent him flying off his road bike. He broke both arms, skull, jaw, ribs and one leg, spending nearly four months in recovery.

A Textor hallmark is his almost-obsessive disdain for what he calls the "elites" and their "moral vanity", something Shane Stone attributes to his Territory childhood. Textor describes the Darwin he grew up in as a young boy's paradise, wandering swamps, creeks and beaches with his older brother and mates. If you turned up at a friend's and stayed for dinner, no one blinked an eye. "Not like Sydney," Textor sniffs. "There was no one better than you in Darwin".

The second youngest of five children, Textor was something of an eccentric loner at school who showed off by quoting "obscure texts". He's proud that his schools, Alawa Primary and Casuarina High, were unfashionable - "where all the wogs, in inverted commas, went." When Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin on Christmas Eve, 1974, he sat it out with his family in the brick garage as the roof tore off their house. He recalls it as more adventure than trauma, though he remembers the storm's "metallic scream".

The real ordeal of his adolescence was the fatal illness of his mother, Gay, during his last year of high school. She was wasting away from lung cancer but Textor told no one. "She was suffering badly," he says "but you go into denial as your mum's dying. I just dived into my books and bikes, hung around my mates. That's what blokes do." Many years later, when partner Susie was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, Textor went through those agonies again, although this time the disease was beaten. He is close to his father, Roger, a retired former deputy commissioner of police in the Territory, relating gleefully that "when Dad was approaching 80 he drove his new red MX-5 sports car to Adelaide and eloped with his girlfriend and they had a dirty weekend in the Clare Valley".

His boyhood memories feature evenings where "strange grey men called Frank" would sit with Roger around the kitchen table discussing "pragmatic politics" well into the night.

As a teen, Textor once met and admired Bob Hawke, and handed out how-to-vote cards for the leftie father of a school friend. But he says he had little interest in party politics at school or at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he studied economics. He's never joined the Liberal Party or the CLP and labels himself a "conservative pragmatist", albeit one who supports gay marriage and constitutional change for recognition of Aborigines.

Leaving the ANU, he was briefly a cadet at the Australian Bureau of Statistics before returning to Darwin to work for then-CLP leader Marshall Perron as an economist. It was from there that Stone poached him to set up the CLP's internal polling operation. The then rank amateur didn't blanch. "They told me that the party wanted to do this polling caper, and how would I do it?" Textor recalls. "I said, 'I don't know, but I'll read up.' "

Textor became embroiled in controversy over the 1994 NT election, when Labor accused him of orchestrating polling questions that contained damaging insinuations against ALP candidates on the eve of the poll - a form, his opponents alleged, of "push polling". It's a charge he strenuously denies - and has taken legal action over several times. His latest, and still unresolved, suit is against Mike Kelly, a former federal Labor MP who repeated the allegation in a tweet last year.

The issue touches an exposed nerve in Textor. "I absolutely dispute the claim [of push polling]," he says. "It's wrong, and if you attempt to damage me with this flawed and intellectually corrupted accusation, I will damage you." Yet he admits to "things I regret deeply doing now" in the Territory, particularly the way the CLP played on Darwin residents' fears about Aboriginal land rights.

"At the end of the day, you just say, 'Well I didn't need to do that to win.' " Later, he says: "You can kind of do the wrong things for the right reason and right things for the wrong reason; that's what I learnt there."

Textor and Robb got into more bother in 1995, during an ACT by-election, in which Liberal polling questions suggested Labor candidate Sue Robinson favoured abortion up to nine months. Textor is short about this, too, saying erroneous information was provided, he presumed, by Howard's office. Robb, on behalf of the Liberal Party, paid Robinson a reported $80,000 damages and Textor agreed to an apology. "I apologised for relying on wrong information," he says defiantly.

Eschewing Sydney's more fashionable suburbs, Textor today lives on Sydney's lower north shore with Oscar and Susie. The house, he says, has a "crazy backyard with herb gardens, tomatoes, an old tyre swing and a bloody great chicken coop" lorded over by his prize specimen, a Wynadotte called Dottie.

His previous long-term relationship was with Davida, 10 years his senior, whom he met in Darwin barely out of his teens. There was a "major kerfuffle" in Top End legal circles when she left the senior lawyer she'd been with to take up with Textor, says a source who knew all three at the time. "It was quite a topic of discussion." For many years the pair did not live together, though she and Textor have two sons, Lindsay, now 27, and Max, 19. Textor won't discuss his earlier relationship except to say he and Davida are "friendly" and that "I'll make sure she is comfortable forever".

As to what he'll do in future, he says he's discovering a love of writing. And he's clear about what he doesn't want to be: "I often say to mates of mine, if we are watching a bit of TV together and one of those arse clowns comes on Sky News or ABC's The Drum - the name-dropping, cliquey, grey, ghost-men, the f...in' half-dead - I say, 'Mate, if I ever get like that, f...in' come along and shoot me.' "